A Fragile Sort of Closure
by UndiscoveredSpecies
Summary: Destiel and daddy issues.


"Dean, I think you have some issues that need to be addressed."

Dean looked up. "Wow, don't sugarcoat it."

"I…what?"

"Forget it." He kicked away from the table, the chair rolling several inches across the thin navy carpet. "Tell me, Cas. What are my 'issues?' I'd love to know."

There was a way to put this delicately; Dean's voice was rough and tired, his patience wire-thin and fraying with every dead end he crashed into. "I'm speaking about your relationship with your father."

"Dammit, Castiel, my father is dead, so just let him be, huh?" He kicked away from the table in exasperation, turning briefly to stare out the window with intensity to nearly shatter the glass.

"Dean." Castiel stayed where he stood, between Dean and the door. "I saw you flinch when you heard the sound of Sam taking off his belt."

His shoulders didn't tense so much as freeze, tautness exploding into them like a river bursting through a dam. "He was making a tourniquet," Dean said in a strange voice, lower even than his usual tones. "He'd been shot—he was hurt, of _course_ I flinched!" He leaned forward to brace the heels of his hands against the sides of the windows and Castiel saw that his scarred hands were white-knuckled and shivering. "We've run this case into the ground and we still don't have any trails to follow, Sam was hurt yesterday and the last thing I need is to have you pretending to be a shrink and accusing me of having daddy issues! Drop it, okay?"

Tread carefully, carefully. "I'm not basing my assumptions just on your reaction to the sound," Castiel said. "I've heard the things you say when you have nightmares. You're begging someone to stop, please, that you didn't mean to let it happen and you won't let it happen again."

"Cas," Dean said, his voice sharp with warning.

"You don't use that language with your brother and I can't imagine what sort of altercation you would get into with a monster or demon to say something like that."

" _Castiel, stop it!_ " Dean whirled on him and his face was bloodless, his green eyes jade against snow. "Shut up! You don't know a damn thing about me, you don't know a damn thing about my dad! My dad taught me everything I know—he was a good man! So shut up!"

Castiel took a slow step forward, rocking his weight from one foot to the next. "You're so quick to defend him."

"Because he's done nothing—he—I won't have you attacking him like that!" Dean took a fast pace closer, fury contorting his face. He was ready to fight and Castiel was in no hurry to be on the receiving ends of his fists again.

 _Gently now,_ Castiel reminded himself. "He taught you everything," he echoed. "You looked up to him."

"Shut your mouth, or I swear to god I'll start swinging."

"It's okay to admit that he hurt you, Dean."

"Shut up."

Castiel tilted his head, studying Dean's pale, furious face. "We're not so different, you know."

"One of us is about to get his ass handed to him if he doesn't drop it right now."

"You think I don't know what it's like to idolize your father, then to be bombarded with doubt until you're spinning and you're left wondering if the man you look up to is the man you know?" Castiel kept his voice soft, quiet.

"This shouldn't be important to you," Dean snarled. His thumbs rubbed against the fingers of his clenched fist in an unconscious nervous habit.

"Your wellbeing or lack thereof is very important to me," Castiel told him calmly. "More so than you realize."

"You're putting that wellbeing in serious danger by continuing to talk about this." Dean took a step closer, radiating aggression, but Castiel could sense that his meticulously-constructed defense of dismissal and then anger was dissolving, whether or not he realized it. There was so much pent-up pain inside him, boiling with volcanic power and patience. Dean had spent so many years in denial and in willful ignorance, but an eruption was overdue. A few more nudges in the right places and those cracked walls would come crumbling down…

"I will never understand the relationship you had with your father," Castiel said, continuing to pretend that he was deaf to Dean's threats. "My own paternal relationship, however, was also…lacking. I understand the pain."

"You don't understand _shit_!"

"You're not alone in this."

"Oh, please." Dean threw up his hands in exasperation, his voice rising as he grew more upset. "Spare me your feely psychobabble bullshit! I've always been alone!"

There. The first crack. Castiel could sense it, raw as an open wound, and he could see the walls beginning to shudder with the first tremors of that desperately-needed earthquake. "This is something you can't talk about with Sam."

"I'll talk to Sam about whatever the hell I want to!" It was the same response as he had been giving, but Castiel saw the momentary flash of panic in his eyes. Was he sensing the slow-building shatter, or was he working just as hard to repair the walls as Castiel was taking them down?

"That's true. He's your brother. But you can't talk to him about this. You won't let yourself."

"Cas, I am _this close_ to making sure you won't be able to talk again for a long, _long_ time." Dean retreated a step and Castiel stayed where he was, knowing that combined physical intimidation and verbal attacks would make an abrupt and messy end to this two-man chess. Dean would threaten but he would cancel it out by falling back, leaving Castiel to craft a similarly neutral response.

"Silence me if you like," he said, twitching his shoulders in a subtle shrug. "But you understand what I'm saying to you. I can see it on your face."

Dean looked away quickly, turning his head to glare daggers at the wall. Silence fell, so charged and fraught with tension that it could be plucked like a string, sounding an anxious note off the dingy walls of the motel room. "Listen to me, you son of a bitch." His voice was rocks and razors, a voice to make a lesser man quail in fear. "I don't know what the hell you think you're playing at, I don't know what the hell you want me to do or say, but this isn't funny. I'm not getting into this with you—you have no right to know _anything_ about my dad!"

"Dean…"

"SHUT UP!" He snatched a nearly-empty beer bottle from the small table in the corner and hurled it at the wall. It exploded in a magnificent spray of glass and amber foam, raining down onto the carpet and the bland green bedspreads. "Shut up! Shut up, Cas! My father was a good man!"

Castiel repaired the bottle with a wave of his hand, making it rematerialize in case Dean needed to keep throwing things. The cracks were widening and Castiel gave the wall another nudge. "Good men can do bad things, Dean."

"Yeah, well if bad things did happen it's because I deserved them!" The words were out before Dean fully realized what he was saying; that much was apparent in his widening eyes and his faint, choked gasp as he tried in vain to pull back what he had said.

"Did you?" Now was the time to step forward, and Castiel did so.

"It—the belt, it was one time! One time, _one!_ " He waved a hand at nothing, trying to smear the pain into illegibility. "I was ten, I deserved it, I had been sloppy and careless and Sam—"

"Dean." Castiel's voice was barely more than a whisper. "What child deserves to be beaten?"

"He didn't—it wasn't—no! No, we're not talking about this! My dad made me strong!" The vehemence behind the protests was just as powerful, but the heart was lacking.

Castiel pushed again at the walls, insistently, gently. "You were already strong, Dean. It's in your blood, your spirit. You have the strength of millions and you don't realize it. Your father may have shaped your resilience, but he also made you afraid."

"Everyone's afraid of something. Some part of you has to be afraid of what you hunt. That's the part that keeps you alive."

"Whose words are those?" Another step. Dean was close enough to touch but Castiel let his arms stay at his sides.

"Castiel. Please. Just stop."

"Your father never looked to your strength, your resourcefulness. I hear the things you murmur in your dreams, I see the pain in your eyes." Castiel reached out and let the side of his thumb brush ever so lightly against Dean's clenched jaw, as casually as he could, before he settled his hand on his shoulder. Advancements to physical comfort were a vital but precarious step in the journey; they could reinforce the walls just as easily as they could bring them down. "It's not a crime to love your father and know that he hurt you."

Dean didn't answer for a long moment, his eyes hard as flint and his clenched hands trembling like leaves…but he didn't shake Cas off. He didn't move at all. "So I suppose you're going to tell me that it's okay to cry or be vulnerable or whatever namby-pamby shit it is you angels think?" In some ways this voice was worse than his anger; it was hollow and dead, an echo of his fighting spirit ghosting forlornly after the words.

"Nothing in creation was made to be eternally hard-hearted," Castiel told him quietly. "Humans least of all. Your capacity to feel is unparalleled—why do you refuse yourself that? Grieving is not weakness and denial is not always strength. To close yourself off from sadness or to train yourself to turn it into anger…you're not a robot, Dean, however much you might like to be. You're human, and it's okay to hurt."

Dean pushed away, but he didn't go to the door. He sank onto one of the beds, dropping his elbows onto his knees and shoving his head into his palms, gripping at his hair with the desperation of drowning man clutching at a lifeline. "My dad made mistakes," he said in that same hollow voice. "He made a lot of them and hell, I'm making them too. But I can't—I won't—" He broke off abruptly as he choked on his words, and there was the faintest _pap_ as a tear fell to the thin, ugly carpet. "Don't tell Sam I broke, okay?"

"You have my word." Castiel sat gingerly beside him. The wall was falling apart, years of mental rewiring and deep-rooted dogmas temporarily relaxed. It was a fragile sort of closure, but it was a step. "You needn't be ashamed of this, Dean. Even if he knew, I'm sure Sam would understand. Life hasn't been easy, for either of you."

"Yeah." Dean brushed the back of his hand against his face, smearing away a tear while acting like he was scratching an itch. Castiel pretended not to notice, keeping his eyes fixed on a point across the room and his hands loosely folded in his lap. "My whole life it's been 'take care of Sammy.' I'm not gonna let anything happen to him…hell. I've fucked that promise over nine ways from Sunday. The shit he went through that I couldn't save him from…" He shook his head and another tear tapped against the thin carpet. "Some son I turned out to be."

"Dean." Castiel shifted on the bed, turning toward him. "There are things in life that can't be stopped; the choices of others, the evil in the others…you stare down the world and dare devils to fight you, but you're one man. You can't take the blame for the pain these years have brought you and your brother. You do as much as you can, as well as you can, and nobody has the right to ask for anything more. You're human and beautifully so, and that includes the times you fail."

"That's all I was ever supposed to do. Take care of Sammy, keep my little brother safe." The words were mechanical and convictionless; Dean spoke with a voice of ash and loss.

"You've been so focused on Sam that you've forgotten how to take care of yourself." Castiel put his hand on Dean's further shoulder, resting an arm across his back, and the last of the wall fell away. Dean slumped with a choking gasp, one tear and then another tapping to the carpet, and he didn't protest as Castiel put his other arm around him. "It's okay, Dean."

"Cas, I…"

"Hush," Castiel told him, firm but gentle. "Don't fight so hard that you lose yourself in the battle." Dean sagged into his arms and Castiel stroked his shoulder, the touch unpracticed and clumsy but sincere. "You've been hurting for so long, Dean, and it's time you start to heal."


End file.
